


Rematch

by DetroitBabe



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Comics)
Genre: Eighth Doctor Comics, Gen, Humor, Multi-Era, Season/Series 11, Useless Lesbians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:20:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22804726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetroitBabe/pseuds/DetroitBabe
Summary: A bit bittersweet, but generally light-hearted thing about girls in space, doubles and past selves, pompous aliens, revenge fantasies, making use of pop-culture knowledge, and a big, big universe of (im)possibilities.
Relationships: Bill Potts & Izzy Sinclair, Eighth Doctor & Izzy Sinclair, Twelfth Doctor & Nardole & Bill Potts
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Rematch

**Author's Note:**

> The story is this: I wanted a New Who Doctor to meet the Toymaker, I wanted a multi-era thing with my faves, and after Pilot came out I desperately needed for Bill and Izzy to meet, so I started writing this, but then my hard drive fried and I lost it. Not sure where the sudden urge to reconstruct and finish it came from, 2 years later, but here it is.  
> From Izzy’s perspective, this is set after Endgame, with perhaps something non-canon happening in between, but not too much. From Bill’s perspective, this is set directly after Thin Ice. I only just found out that Twelve and Clara met the Toymaker in the comics, not sure if I’m contradicting something, but who cares. I had fun.

i.

There’s nothing more terrifying than having a poster fall on top of you in the middle of the night.

 _Well, now,_ Izzy told herself, calming her breath, _that’s simply not true, is it?_ Everything that’s happened to her since last week was far more terrifying. This was peanuts, really. She sat up in her bed and the full-length Darth Vader slid to the floor with the LUWBUBHUFUFBUWBUFBUB sound of glossy paper. Izzy shivered; not because of fright this time, but because outside of her cozy cocoon of blankets the room was cold. No, not just cold - it was bloody freezing. For a second she thought she had accidentally left the window open, before her sleepy brain caught on and remembered that if there had been an open window here, it would have been open not to the chilly English winter night, but to the much colder vacuum of space, and she would not have been alive to reflect on that mistake. With a grunt, she retreated back into the cocoon, still warm from her body, and tried to go back to sleep.

A deep, solemn knell as if of church tower bells reverberated through the room, and Izzy smushed her face into her pillow. She was beginning to think this place didn’t like her. Its night-time noises were strange, different to those of an old house that she was used to. She couldn’t shake the unpleasant feeling that the walls were watching her through the eyes of the repeating circular pattern. She was being irrational, frustrated, sleepy and scared, and now also cold, and the pounding echo of the bells was making her feel like all her internal organs were being flipped inside out. She decided to look for the Doctor. Just like Max back home, he seemed to think a cup of tea would solve most of her troubles and anxieties; and miraculously enough, it often seemed to work. That’s what she needed right now - a hot cuppa and some human company. Human-shaped, at least.

By the time she got to the first intersection down the corridor she realized she didn’t actually know where to look. The Doctor had said something about the library, but that was hours ago, even if she knew where the library was… She put her hand against the wall and it seemed to vibrate under her touch like a purring cat. The Doctor has told her the ship was alive, and she expected to get used to it someday, but for now it still creeped the hell out of her. Maybe the poster wasn’t just glue giving out. Did the TARDIS have something against sticking posters to her walls, against Izzy in general, or against Darth Vader specifically? Izzy would have liked to know. As she pondered on it, sulkily, another thought popped into her head: if the TARDIS was alive, and sentient, as the Doctor claimed, could they talk?

“Hello?” she asked out loud, feeling a bit silly. “I, uh - I hope you didn’t mind me redecorating the moment I moved in. I like it here, I really do. It’s just a little - _alien,_ you know.” Hmph. You’d think she’d love nothing more. Izzy S, paranormal investigator, UFO hunter. They say to be careful what you wish for…

“Anyway, I’m - I’m looking for the Doctor. Can you help me with that?” There was no response. With her finger, she traced the outline of one of the round indentations in the wall, and it popped open, exposing a mess of wiring and a small screen flashing with strange, intricate symbols. She leaned in closer to it.

“Computer, show me the location of the Doctor,” she commanded, and stood upright with her hands on her hips, doing her best Jean-Luc Picard impression. The faint glow emanating from the cracks in wall panelling flashed blinding bright. Izzy turned her head around, shielding her eyes with her hand, and through her fingers she saw someone standing on the other end of the corridor - and then it all went dark. By the time the lights went back to normal, the Doctor was running towards her.

“Thank you,” she said quietly to the wall. The Doctor careened into her, sweeping her up into a hug with the momentum of a car crash on a motorway.

“Izzy!” he exclaimed. “Izzy, Izzy, Izzy, are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I was just looking for you. My room was, uh, acting up and -”

The Doctor put his hands on her shoulders and stared at her with unsettling intensity. She thought of how often, when watching a horror movie, she’d find close-ups of the actors’ frightened faces scarier than the actual monsters. The Doctor looked gravely worried, and it was scarier than a monster.

“Did you hear the bell?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“The Cloister Bell,” he said, and he managed to make it sound more ominous than the thing itself. Izzy frowned, puzzled.

“You’ve got a… church in here, too?”

“The Cloister Bell is an alarm system,” the Doctor explained hurriedly. “It only sounds in the moments of utmost danger to the TARDIS, her occupants, and the Web of Time.”

“ _And?!_ ” As if one of those wasn’t enough!

“They often go together, so I’ve found,” the Doctor sighed.

ii.

The Doctor was sulking.

He has been, in chronological order, told what to do, beaten in an argument, and stranded; and, as Bill had already found out, next to karaoke (shame, with his singing voice), the head of the Department of Economics (understandable), and racist pricks (bonus points), those were some of his least favourite things. So, despite his age bearing a remarkable resemblance to a moody teenager, he has stomped off upstairs, dropped into an armchair and picked up his guitar. He plugged in the amp and the lights under the ceiling flickered. It looked like his own fault, but the thought didn’t cross his mind. With a heavy sigh, he lifted himself up and leaned over the guard rail.

“I told you not to touch anything!” he shouted.

Nardole’s head popped up from underneath the spilled guts of console wiring.

“I can hardly calibrate the chrono-historical stress gauge without touching anything,” he countered, in that matter-of-factly, but also am-I-talking-to-a-child-or-an-idiot tone of his. The Doctor retreated a step, physically and rhetorically.

“Well, then, don’t touch anything except the gauge!”

“If you know so much better, why don’t you do it yourself?”

Bill brought her teacup to her lips, hiding a smile behind it, and turned her head around, pretending she was looking over the bookshelves. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Doctor huff and settle back into his chair. They caught eye contact and he winked at her as he plucked the opening chords to _Starman_. Bill’s eyes widened.

“I had that stuck in my head the whole day!” she exclaimed. The Doctor raised an eyebrow, and Bill gasped. “Can you read my mind? Are you reading my mind right now?”

The lights flickered again, in a fast, oscillating pattern. The Doctor frowned, and turned towards Nardole again.

“Oi! What’s with the disco?! If I wanted a disco, I’d take us to one! In fact, I could take us to one right now, if you weren’t… messing around down there!”

The TARDIS jolted. “Shit,” Bill hissed as hot tea splashed onto the front of her shirt. The Doctor turned around, giving her an admonishing look. She stood up, shaking down her fingers, and smiled apologetically.

“Sorry. Ugh, I should change. Mind if I pop off to the wardrobe?”

“Remember the way? Corridor to the left from mister Expert Mechanic down there, third door down, one floor up, turn right pass the swimming pool,” the Doctor recited. Bill repeated the directions in her head.

“Swimming pool? I don’t remember a swimming pool,” she muttered to herself. “Nevermind. Be back in a sec. Try not to kill any life support systems while I’m off.”

“You heard that, Nardole? Try not to kill life support while Bill’s off,” the Doctor echoed.

She skipped down the corridor, humming quietly under her breath. Third door down, there it is, ignore the weird statue, one floor up a spiral staircase, the size of this place! Pass the swimming pool, can’t resist a peek, turn right -

A noise came from behind her, and the bundle of cables running along the ceiling showered her with sparks like cold sparklers. She should probably run back before something blows up. She turned around - and saw someone standing at the end of the corridor. A shrouded, ghostly figure - no, a girl… wrapped in a blanket?

“Doctor…” she began, walking back into the console room.

“...temporally unstable! I can feel those things, you know. It’s like a migraine right now.”

“Seems frozen on the last step,” Nardole said, looking over the monitors. “Honestly, you’d think the spaceship of the most advanced time-travelling race in the universe -”

“Was doing just fine without you. Try turning that section off and on again.”

“I’m not sure if it’s safe -"

“Doctor?” Bill asked, louder this time. “Sorry to interrupt, but -”

“Just flip the switch!”

The Doctor reached over Nardole’s shoulder and pressed a lever down. There was another jolt, and all the lights went off. There was a moment of silence, and in the dark everyone opened their mouths to say something - and the lights came on again. The Doctor spoke up first.

“See?” he said. “We’re fine. Everything’s fine, no thanks to you.”

“Doctor?”

“Yes?” he turned to Bill, finally giving her his full attention. He noticed she was still wearing the same tea-soaked clothes.

“Is there anyone on board except for the three of us?” she asked. The Doctor frowned.

“Why would you ask that?”

“Because I think I just saw someone. Pass the swimming pool, there was this… girl?”

“Not your puddle friend, was it?”

“No, I… I don’t know who she was. It was just in a flash, but I don’t think I ever saw her before. She looked… well, human.”

“Ah. Was she a bit… on the transparent side?”

“Not exactly, no... hold on,” she paused. “Are you making fun of me? Is there a ghost in here? Are ghosts real?”

“Of course not. Well, it actually depends on how you define a ghost. I think what you saw might've been a minor… temporal hiccup, thanks to Nardole’s tinkering. A projection from the past. But we’re fine now.” The Doctor patted his hand down on the TARDIS console. “No one knows this ship better than me.” His words were punctuated by another violent jolt. “What was that?”

“We’ve landed,” Nardole said, peering at the readout from the navigator screen.

“Nonsense, we couldn’t have landed anywhere because we haven’t taken off. We’re still in my office. Look.” The Doctor pulled another lever and the doors opened slowly, and white light came flooding in.

“Wanna bet?” Nardole said weakly.

iii.

Bill didn’t even know when she had passed out, but it must’ve been a while ago, because her shirt has almost dried off by now. It was still a bit damp, though, so at least no one was going to tell her that she’s been in a coma for decades, or something. She sat up, feeling a bit light-headed, and looked around.

The space around her looked like a dead end of a corridor. Its floor, walls and ceiling were a uniform, stark white, emitting a soft glow. It was also empty - no trace of Nardole, the Doctor, the TARDIS, or anything at all besides her, and a small, colourful box at her feet. She picked it up. It was a set of crayons - ordinary stuff, labelled in Earth English, same brand she vaguely recalled from her childhood. She stood up dizzily, and put her hand against the wall to steady herself. Although stiff and solid, it had the texture of paper. She took out one crayon from the box and made an experimental mark. After a moment’s thought, she changed it into a “B”, added an arrow pointing out and set off.

She’d make a mark every time she’d get to an intersection, and good on her, since she’s already circled back a few times - that, or the walls have shifted when she weren't looking. Every now and then she’d call out a “hello” or an “anybody out there?”, but so far she hasn’t heard an answer. The silence and emptiness was making her increasingly uneasy, and although startled at first, she was just so immensely relieved when she took a turn she hasn’t taken before yet and saw somebody else there. It was the same girl again - the same silhouette down the corridor, although more distinct now than in the dimly lit nooks and crannies of the TARDIS. The girl saw Bill too, and took an uncertain step forward.

“Hey!” Bill waved at her. Boy, was she glad to have some company. Unless this was some evil alien in disguise, but... Bill narrowed her eyes. The girl looked a few years younger than her, and, well, adorable, with a slightly lost, but curious expression on her face, framed by a hairstyle that she probably thought of as “fun”, and everybody else as “tacky”. A blue blanket with yellow stars on it was draped loosely around her shoulders, and underneath it she wore an oversized Superman t-shirt, short-shorts and fluffy slippers. Sure, looks can be deceiving, but Bill decided to give her the benefit of a doubt.

“Where am I?” the girl asked, straight to the point. “One minute I was in the T-”

She bit her tongue, but Bill finished the sentence for her. “TARDIS?”

Now it was the other girl who turned suspicious.

“What do you know about that?”

“I’ve seen you. Just before we came here. I’m a friend of the Doctor’s, I was in the TARDIS too, he said…” Bill slapped her forehead. “Oh! Of course! You’re from the past, we… crashed into you, and we got… displaced in time and space, or something.” Despite the “or something”, the girl looked at Bill like she knew what was going on, so Bill struck a proud pose, chin up and hands on her hips.

“You know, this ain’t my first rodeo. It’s, uh, my… fourth rodeo.” She clicked her tongue. “Yeah.”

“I’ve only been travelling with the Doctor for a few days,” Izzy admitted, but nevertheless her company seemed to have done a lot of good for Bill’s morale.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said brightly, riding this wave of newfound confidence. “We can figure this out.”

“And find the Doctor?” Izzy prompted.

“Who needs him?” Bill realized she got carried away a little. “But we should, of course. Yes. Definitely,” she corrected herself.

This time, behind the corner there was a door. It slid open as they approached it, and immediately closed behind them to the sound of an 8-bit fanfare. There were two other doors leading out of the room; next to each, on a small podium, stood a robot.

The robots looked like toys; and old ones, too. Retro. They looked like a 1960s filmmaker’s idea of a futuristic design, done on a tight budget. Still, Bill examined them from a respectful distance. Little screens lit up on their chests, and hesitantly she stepped up closer to see. Two stylised, pixelated doors appeared. One opened to the words LEVEL UP, the other read GAME OVER; then they closed and opened again, captioned the other way around, and a question mark flashed between them. They vanished, replaced by a block of text.

“One of us lies, one of us tells the truth. You have: one question remaining,” Bill read out loud. “Oh, it’s one of those logic puzzles! I’m good at those. Just give me a sec…”

Behind her, Izzy laughed. “What, really? You don’t know this one?” She walked up to the robot. “Now, listen carefully. If I asked the other one of you, which door leads to the next level, what would it say?”

LEFT, the screen read. Izzy gave it a thumbs-up. “We need to go right,” she said.

“But - oh, I get it! That’s clever! How did you figure it out so fast?”

Izzy grinned. “I’ve seen _Labyrinth_. A good few times,” she said, and then her face fell.

“You stopped smiling. Why did you stop smiling?”

“Well, I just remembered - so, in the movie, Sarah solves this riddle, right? But it’s a lie. The Goblin King is cheating. She picks the right door, but there’s a trap behind it anyway.”

They stood in front of the door. There was a button next to it. It was labelled “OPEN”. It was red. It was glowing.

“I guess we’ll have to risk it,” Izzy said eventually.

“Yeah.”

“We don’t really have a choice,” she added.

“Yeah.” Bill grabbed her hand. It took Izzy by surprise. She felt a tingling sensation in her fingers. She looked at them, and then her gaze wandered up to Bill’s rainbow-striped crop-top. She bit her lip. Then Bill’s voice brought her back to reality.

“On three, okay? One, two -”

iv.

The Doctor knocked on the robot’s casing. Behind him, the door swooshed open, and closed again. He turned around slowly.

“Oh, no,” said the stranger. “No, no, no…Temporally unstable,” he muttered, “I told him…”

“I’m the Doctor. Who are you?” the Doctor asked, in a tone bearing no objection.

With a sigh, the man pushed his sunglasses up onto the top of his head.

“Look at me. Look me in the eye. Who do you think I am?”

The Doctor squinted up at him, and then recognition dawned on his face.

“Oh…”

“Yeah.”

“You’re me.”

“Yeah.”

“From the future?”

The older Doctor frowned in surprise, but then remembered the memory issues, and thought, _fair enough._ “Yes, from the future,” he said.

“Do you know where we are?” The Doctor asked.

“Not a clue,” his future self replied with a grin, walking up to the nearest robot, “but this feller might.” He pulled his glasses down. There was a high-pitched whizz, and the screen on the robot’s chest flashed letters and numbers.

“Are these… sonic?” The younger Doctor regarded critically the sunglasses, the constellation of holes in the worn-out sweater, the frayed sleeves of a hoodie jumper poking out of the black overcoat. “Looks like I lost my sense of style somewhere down the line.” He couldn’t see the other’s eyes, but could feel that the sentiment was returned with the appraisal of the pink brocade and the cobalt blue velvet.

“Improved, more like. At least my hair doesn’t look like a cheap wig anymore. Now shut up and let me work.”

“You’re checking their programming for answers. Isn’t that… cheating?”

The older Doctor looked at him coolly over the rim of his glasses.

“Don’t get all... morally superior with me,” he said. “I’m you, don’t forget. I know all your dirty secrets.”

“I just meant,” his younger self replied, starting to work on the other robot with his screwdriver, “that whoever’s in charge of this place might not take kindly to that.”

“That’s the fun part… ha!” The Doctor exclaimed triumphantly, as a small _bang!_ came from within the robot, followed by a thin wisp of smoke and the smell of burned circuitry. 

“Did you get something useful? Do you know where we should go?”

“Not “we”. You’re going right, I’m going left.”

“Why?”

“Our friends went right. Try catching up with them.”

“And you?”

“I’m going backstage.”

“Have you got a plan?”

“You should really know better than to ask that.”

“Wait! There’s something you should know,” the younger Doctor said grimly. “I have a nasty suspicion about who’s behind all this.”

“Oh?”

“And… I’m afraid it’s my fault.”

Nardole tapped the robot’s casing and a part of it clattered to the floor. He walked up to the other one, and tried to read something from the scrambled-up pixels fluttering across its screen.

“Oh, well,” he said eventually. He fished a fifty-pence out of his coat pocket and tossed it up into the air.

v.

Two steps down the corridor was a trapdoor. The trapdoor was to be expected, and so when the Doctor fell through it, he did it more or less deliberately. A quick scan over his shoulder through the sonic glasses confirmed that the bottom of the pit was a long, long way down. His consolation was a suspicion - an educated guess, given how ludicrously often this exact situation has happened to him - that somebody who went to all this trouble of abducting him to play their games wouldn’t just waste the effort by killing him so early on. They didn’t even get to the dramatic-reveal-and-gloating bit yet; this was not the end. Still, he didn’t fancy hanging around to check if he was right.

The walls of the shaft weren’t as smooth as those up in the maze; they resembled the innards of an elaborate engine, with pipes and pistons and cogs and thick cables of braided metal wire. The cables were stretched tight and difficult to reach, but not too difficult for someone, say, equipped with a sonic device capable of snapping one loose, and with reflexes fast enough to grab it before it smacks them in the face. The momentum of his fall made the maneuver a bit hard on the shoulder, but after that the swing was easy enough, and once the pain in the arm wore off, he could begin to climb down the scaffolding of the machinery. It didn’t take him long to find a tunnel, branching off perpendicularly from the pit. It was another labyrinth mirroring the one above, but this time, he wasn’t just wandering aimlessly around it. There was a distortion nearby, crackling with energy, tugging at his mind; it would’ve required more effort _not_ to follow it.

It was the TARDIS, just as he thought. Standing in the middle of a vast chamber, surrounded by the complicated coils of machinery, the air around it crackling with energy. The light on the roof was flickering wildly, and above it, the metal of the ceiling was groaning and pulsating a hot red. Looking at it, the perspective seemed to shift, as if reality itself was bending into a new shape. It didn’t look good. The Doctor walked around it, keeping a careful distance. It felt like a stroll on the edge of a cliff, during a storm. The tiniest nudge could be enough to -

“I would watch my steps if I were you,” came a voice from somewhere behind his back. He turned around slowly, and faced what looked like a middle-aged man with an offendingly bad taste in clothes, but in reality was something much older and stranger and more dangerous.

“So, he - I was right. It _is_ you.”

“As always, tremendous _fun_ to meet you, Doctor.”

The Doctor tried to ignore the noise of the TARDIS screaming directly into his brain, and focus on the conversation at hand. It was a bit hard to detect sarcasm, under the circumstances, so he opted for a simple and honest rebuttal.

“Can’t say the same,” he said. And then, a very important question came to mind. “Hang on, which one of you are you?”

“The one you created, if that is what you mean,” the Toymaker answered. “The one you used. But I’ve learned my lesson, Doctor: you are either a pawn or a player.” He snapped his fingers, the room shuddered, and a small table appeared beside him, complete with two chairs, a board and two sets of tokens. “Care for a game of Martian ssech?”

“How about you tell me your evil plans instead?” The Doctor smiled. “No? Well, suit yourself. This is impressive, whatever you were doing,” he talked on, gesturing around. “Two TARDISes snatched at the point of collision. A lot of energy. You’ve trapped it, you’re using it. It is, of course, a bit like plugging your TV into an atom bomb for power. And if it goes boom… who knows? Big Bang, a whole universe born, or at least a doorway punched through to the next one. Come to think of it, you might like it. A brand new, bigger board, yours to control.”

The Toymaker looked bored already, but in a way that seemed strained, almost as if there was a deliberate effort behind it. He waved a hand with studied carelessness, and two robots, bigger versions of the ones guarding the doors in the labyrinth, stepped out of the shadows behind the Doctor’s back.

“Take him to the others,” the Toymaker commanded. “I’m not playing your game, Doctor. You’re playing mine,” he said, but there was the slightest hint of uncertainty in his voice; at least the Doctor hoped it wasn’t just his wishful thinking.

vi.

“We survived, then,” Bill said, letting out a held-in breath. She hasn’t let go of Izzy’s hand, though, and Izzy seemed a little flustered by that, in a way Bill thought she recognized.

The floor was now laid with black and white tiles, arranged in a chessboard pattern. It could have been purely decorative, but they still decided it might be marginally safer to only step on the white ones. This forced them to constantly look under their feet, which perhaps was a convenient way of having this conversation.

“So, you’re from the future?” Izzy asked.

“The Doctor’s future, from your point of view? It’s 2017 back home, for me.”

“I was born in 1979. It was 1996 when I left with the Doctor.”

“Not such a distant future, then,” Bill said.

“Yeah, it’s…” Izzy glanced up and, realizing she wasn’t looking under her feet anymore, she stumbled, and tightened her grip on Bill’s hand. “It’s funny. I want to see the future, like, a proper future, flying cars and spaceships and robots… But I also wonder what’s it gonna be like in, dunno, ten, twenty years. How much stuff changes. I’ll go back home at some point, I suppose. So sometimes I get curious about the little things.”

“I know what you mean,” Bill said. “I asked the Doctor to take me to the future on our first trip, the first proper one. And it was… alien. It wasn’t even on Earth. And there were spaceships and robots, but also… Some terrible things happened. And I found this, like, recording of Earth history, and I -”

Bill realized she couldn’t stop talking now if she wanted to. For the first time since she met the Doctor, there was someone who she could talk about this stuff with, and who would _understand._ The Doctor and Nardole lived like this for goodness knows how long, while her friends and family back on Earth only ever saw time in the right order; and she was stuck somewhere in between those two points, on her own. Maybe Heather would’ve understood, if she was here now. But she wasn't.

“I couldn’t stop looking. I was like, I don’t _want_ to know, but I couldn’t resist. Ever read a murder mystery and peeked at the end? It was just like that, except… real places I know. People I know could’ve been there, somewhere in the crowd. Or their children, or grandchildren, or -”

“What did you see?”

Bill shook her head. “I probably shouldn't tell you. When we get out of here, you can see the future for yourself, if you want to.” It was a very Doctor-ish answer, she realized. For a while, the went on in silence, skipping from one white tile to the next as if gingerly playing a very solemn game of hopscotch.

“I - I like your shirt,” Izzy said eventually. Bill definitely knew that deep breath Izzy took just before saying it.

“If you’re trying to ask if I’m gay, the answer’s yes.”

The frankness of the response took Izzy a little by surprise.

“Is it... no big deal in the future?”

“Depends on the person, really. I still haven’t told my mum. Not my real mum, I tell her everything, but my foster mum. I don’t know how she’d react. I don’t think she’d hate me, but… Maybe she’d be uncomfortable, or ask weird questions and try to make me uncomfortable. Sometimes that upsets me even more. But I reckon things are getting better.”

Izzy nodded thoughtfully. “Have you... got someone?”

“...No,” Bill said after a small pause. “I’ve just met this girl, and it turned out she was an alien.”

“Really?” Izzy's eyes widened.

“Well, not exactly. She was taken over by an alien. Or… turned into an alien. I'm not sure how this works. Either way, she left. She’s out there, somewhere.” She shot Izzy a sideways glance, and they caught eye contact. Bill felt like she should say something reassuring. “Look, I’m just starting out, travelling with the Doctor, but… It’s a big universe. And it’s terrifying, but I think it’s also so, so amazing. I think… there’s always something waiting for you around the corner, you know?” She smiled.

The chessboard ended just before the corridor took a ninety degrees turn left. With a cautious sigh of relief, Bill and Izzy entered the next passageway, and four black-clad ninja warriors dropped on them, swords unsheathed.

vii.

The door opened with a chime of a music-box melody. Prodded ever so slightly with the tip of the guard’s sword, Bill promptly stepped inside, and looked around the room. Patio. Garden. Whatever. It had the same white walls and ceiling as in the labyrinth, but they were barely visible from behind all the rose and yasmin bushes and sculpted dragons. In the central part of the place there were five pagoda-shaped gazebos, each painted a different colour, four in the corners and one on the intersection of crossing paths paved with colourful tiles. In one of the corners, four perfectly motionless, blank-faced Chinese boys dressed in red tunics and red coolie hats stood under a red roof. Bill and Izzy were led to the opposite corner, under a green roof; four green hats lay on the floor inside. Bill frowned, picking one up and turning it around in her hands.

“Is it just me, or does it look like -”

“A ludo board,” Izzy said grimly, confirming Bill’s thoughts. “You know, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“Okay, I know that one,” Bill said. “Next thing you’re gonna say it’s a trap.”

“There’s this… person, this being, me and the Doctor met,” Izzy began to explain. “He takes people and puts them in games.”

“Aliens abducted us to play a game? That sounds… _almost_ like _possibly_ fun. What can we win?”

“Your life, if you’re lucky.”

Not so much fun, then, Bill thought. “And that means…”

Izzy nodded. “If you lose, you die. For real.”

Bill looked around, nervously shifting her weight. Any minute now, the Doctor should arrive, preferably with a plan. And Nardole. The missing green pieces, likely. But who were the players? Next to her was a raised dais, fitted with a table and two chairs; behind them, an ornate, gilded door.

After several agonizingly long minutes, it opened.

Bill stared at the man now towering imperiously over the board. He wore an outfit that was unmistakably oriental, in a gaudy, probably not entirely historically accurate, fancy dress party way, but he was a white guy. Or, he inhabited a white guy’s body. There was nothing wrong with his face as such, but looking directly at it was giving Bill a headache, and when she blinked, there were afterimages of strange shapes under her eyelids. She had a feeling that what her brain told her she was seeing wasn’t entirely what was there, but that she should be grateful for it. Then another man entered, and she saw Izzy’s face light up.

“Do you know him, too?” she whispered.

“It’s the Doctor,” Izzy whispered back, waving at the man, who acknowledged her with a small smile.

“No way,” was all Bill could say to that.

“Tea, Doctor?” the self-styled Chinese emperor asked, with perfectly feigned politeness.

“You know, I might just break my rules and decline,” the Doctor said icily. Bill couldn’t stop gaping at them. They both looked as if they’ve walked down from the stage of a Victorian variety show; not exactly out of place among the room’s decorations, but rather adding to the surreal atmosphere of the whole experience with their private double act. Izzy seemed a little bit more on the ball; Bill was lost. She felt a little embarrassed for staring when the Doctor looked in their direction.

“I seem to be missing two tokens,” he said. “Which _in theory_ is a certain advantage, but I somehow don’t believe you would give me a head start.”

“Indeed, I wouldn’t,” the strange man replied. “I believe your missing pieces are on their way right now.”

As if on cue - no, definitely on cue, surely staged given the man’s obvious penchant for theatrics - the other door opened, and Bill was relieved to finally see the familiar figures of Nardole and the Doctor, her Doctor. The other one sat down in his chair, turning the dice around in his fingers, looking pensive and suspicious.

“This is not your style,” he said eventually, glaring at his opponent. “You prefer… mind games, riddles and chess, telling people they could win if only they were being clever enough. Rolling dice leaves too much to chance and not enough opportunity to gloat over your superior intelligence. And, of course, if it’s not about outsmarting you, you can lose to a mere mortal. Unless the dice are loaded, and you’re cheating.”

“You insult me, Doctor. And don’t you believe in your own luck, anyway?”

Bill held out the last hat.

“Absolutely not,” the Doctor protested.

“Oh no, you’re putting it on,” Bill said firmly. “I know we’re in dire danger of death and all that, but this is going to look really funny.”

viii.

“It is my rematch, so I will take the first move,” the Toymaker announced. The dice clattered across the table. “One. Step forward,” he commanded, and one of the blank-eyed boys in red took his place at the starting square of the board. They could’ve been robots, for all their unnerving stillness and the mechanical walk of the one that moved now.

“In chinese tradition, red is the lucky colour,” the Doctor remarked.

“Thank you, we all wanted to hear that,” Nardole grumbled under his breath.

Izzy’s attention was focused on the Doctor, the one she knew, as she watched him roll the dice. She tried to glean from his face if he had a plan, if he knew a way, if this would all end well. They won last time, but it was a narrow escape.

“Six,” the Doctor said, and Izzy wondered if he was cheating. She wouldn’t mind. The Doctor looked at her, and then the others, clearly conflicted. She could guess what he was thinking, because she was thinking the same thing: whether it was safer to go first or hang back.

“Nardole will go first,” the other Doctor decided for them. Izzy was shocked. _Her_ Doctor would’ve definitely stepped up to go first. They looked and acted so different, it was hard to imagine they were the same person, but if they really were, that meant her Doctor would live to grow older (and grumpier, and seemingly less gung-ho), which meant they were going to get out of here. Didn’t it?

The game went on. There was one especially tense moment when Nardole was about to overtake one of the red pawns, and nobody was sure what was going to happen, but the guy just went obediently back to square one, even though Nardole seemed braced for committing murder if it was necessary. He got to the central space safely, but then their rival regained the upper hand; currently, the third one of his pieces was far ahead, while Izzy as the second still took two or three steps at a time. Bill was frantically pacing around her spot, and the Doctor stood next to her watching the floor.

“Nothing yet,” he muttered. So far, they seemed to be losing.

They were losing, but it didn’t matter, because the Doctor just felt a slight tremor under his feet, like the first rumble of an earthquake. He looked over at his younger self, hoping he’ll manage to stall for a little longer before the Toymaker gets too suspicious; but he underestimated how quick and powerful the shift was going to be. Suddenly, the whole place shook in its foundations. Over the roaring noise of reality ripping at the seams, they heard a familiar vvorping sound. The contours of the TARDIS flashed in the air before disappearing again.

“What have you done, Doctor?!” the Toymaker bellowed, as the walls began to crumble around them.

“It’s not me, it’s the TARDIS!” the Doctor shouted back. “She wasn’t just trapped, she was a lynchpin! Remove it, and your whole castle comes down.”

“Shouldn’t we be getting out of here, then?” Bill asked, tugging at his sleeve.

“Yes, working on it! All of you, over here! That means you too, fancypants!” He gestured at the younger Doctor, who didn’t need to be told twice; he leapt from the dais and ran up to join them.

“The TARDIS should get a lock on our artron signatures now,” he said. And it did, materializing around them with a final _thud_ as the Toymaker's world erupted outside its doors. It rocked and spun, thrown about by the wavefront of the explosion. The Doctors and Nardole were busy at the console, pulling at levers and yelling at each other as sparks erupted from the control panels; Bill pulled Izzy back, and they clung on to the handrails for dear life.

“I still can’t believe they’re both the Doctor,” Izzy said, once their flight became steadier; although she had to admit their piloting style was certainly the same. “Their faces are completely different.”

“I hear you,” Bill agreed. Izzy’s Doctor looked like Lord Byron on Adderall. Even if certain mannerisms felt familiar, the nose was way off. “Do you think he had a plastic surgery, or something? Doctor, did you ever get a facelift?”

“Can we discuss our faces _after_ we get out of here," the Doctor replied exasperatedly, "please?”

ix.

They watched it on the TARDIS’ scanner, from a safe distance: a rift in space exploding with bright light before folding in on itself. It left a nebula behind, a mass of swirling colours. It was really quite pretty; probably even more so if you didn’t know where it came from.

“So, who was he?” Nardole asked before Bill had the chance. “The guy who kidnapped us.”

“He calls himself the Toymaker,” the Doctor explained. “A remnant of primordial chaos before our time, living in his magical castle at the edge of our universe.”

“The Crystal Guardian? I thought he was just a legend,” Nardole said.

“Oh, no, they’re real. The Guardians, the Eternals, the whole lot.”

“Is he… dead?” Bill asked.

“I wouldn’t think so. Thrown out into the Void, but he’ll live. It will take him some time to rebuild his domain, though. I imagine he’ll entertain himself plotting revenge, as always.”

“What about the other one?” the younger Doctor asked. “The replica from the Imagineum? Was he still there?”

“Who do you think blew up the place?”

“Why would he do that?” the other Doctor asked, surprised.

“They were using the TARDIS to power the Toyroom. It was probably failing again. I might have… nudged him to push it a little, suggested that it might help him create a rift to another universe which he could claim his own.”

“But the TARDIS went HADS, and the Toyroom started falling apart.”

“Exactly,” the older Doctor confirmed. “In a way, your creating the Toymaker’s double saved us twice. Talk about playing a long game.”

The other TARDIS stood in an otherwise empty room, upstairs and left of the console deck, her engines humming quietly. The younger Doctor walked up to her, and patted her door affectionately.

“We’ll likely forget that all of this ever happened. Especially you two,” his future self said.

“Hm. Seems to happen to me a lot.”

“Doctor, we’ve talked about this!” Bill hissed in the Doctor’s ear.

“It’s not me this time, it just happens,” he said defensively. “It’s a way of the universe correcting itself. You can’t know your own future.”

Bill cocked her head. “Isn’t that your whole thing, though? Visiting the future?”

“Not my own. Not our own.”

“Come on, Izzy, we should go,” the other Doctor said. “It’s not good for the old girl, to be inside herself for too long.”

“Wait! Wait a moment,” Bill exclaimed, grabbing Izzy’s arm. She gave her a peck on the cheek, and smiled. “See you around.”

x.

“She seemed... lonely,” Bill said, staring out of the window, off into the sky. The Doctor passed her a cup of tea, and sat down on the edge of his desk.

“Well, she’s got me now. And maybe she’ll find someone else, too.”

Bill turned around to face him. “Will she?”

“It’s a big universe,” the Doctor said with an enigmatic smile.

Nardole did knock, but he didn’t wait for an invitation before coming in. He strode purposefully towards the TARDIS, parked in the corner of the office, with a toolbox under his arm.

“Oi, where do you think you’re going?!” the Doctor called after him.

“I never finished calibrating --”

“And you never will! Don’t you remember where it got us last time?!” 

“I can’t let you go flying around with that thing on the blink,” Nardole protested.

“You don’t let me go flying around anyway, remember?”

Bill shook her head, and leaned back in the Doctor’s armchair, cupping the hot mug in her hands.

Izzy blinked a couple of times, and looked around. She and the Doctor were standing in the console room, they seemed to be in mid-flight, and she couldn’t quite recall how they got there. She remembered the bells, looking for the Doctor, the bright white light… and then, something like a strange dream, slipping away from her.

“What just happened?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” the Doctor replied, leaning over the scanner’s monitor. “We’re still in deep space. Not… exactly where we left off, but close. How do you feel?”

"I'm fine," Izzy said. "Just... confused? I feel like I'm forgetting something." Absentmindedly, she touched her cheek, not sure why.


End file.
